Psychopathy

A Very Short Introduction

By: Essi Viding

Narrated by: Esther Wane

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Newspaper column inches have been devoted to murderers with psychopathic features, and we also encounter psychopaths in films and books. Individuals with psychopathy are characterized in particular by lack of empathy and guilt, manipulation of other people and, in the case of criminal psychopathy, premeditated violent behavior. They are dangerous and can incur immeasurable emotional, psychological, physical, and financial costs to their victims and their families.

Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound. For example, people commonly assume that all psychopaths are sadistic serial killers or that all violent and antisocial individuals are psychopaths. Yet, research shows that most psychopaths are not serial killers, and, equally, there are plenty of antisocial and violent offenders who are not psychopaths.

Viding explores the latest genetic, neuroscience, and psychology evidence in order to illuminate why psychopaths behave and develop the way they do, and considers whether it is possible to prevent or even treat psychopathy.

©2019 Essi Viding (P)2020 Tantor

Helpful

Very good information, provided relevant distinctions not typically present in pop culture. And, data galore!

Very informative but extremely redundant

Wish the author could have come up with an abbreviation for the phrase "children at risk for psychopathy," also uses the word empathy a ton in the first couple chapters. Basically says for most of the book that empathy and concern for others and cooperation are the default mode for most humams.... I must have heard the word empathy about 1000 times

Listen, Reflect, Listen Again.

The first time i listened to this introduction to psychopathy i was very critical of what seemed to be the author's biases, namely with respect to class and gender. I was not really interested in the traditional nature/nuture arguments, but in the social construction of psychopathy as a criminal diagnosis that gets thrown around by the psychology industry. I went away, however, and i watched the Errol Morris documentary film "The Thin Blue Line", which features interviews with two different men convicted of homicide, one wrongly convicted; the other rightly convicted, and this latter man is clearly what Viding means by a psychopath. I also watched acclaimed documentary-maker Werner Herzog's "Death Row" series as well, and in these narratives about homicide some individuals emerge as profoundly pyschopathic individuals, while others appear as very tragic victims of youth and circumstance. This book, therefore, is helpful to consider with some external context. Ergo, i think more case examples would have proved helpful.

I do also think the author could have been blunter in areas about how class and gender shape one's potential to become psychopathic, as it it predominately a masculine failing. It is clear the true psycho in "The Thin Blue Line", for example, became psychopathic because of his economic and gendered background.

As to the author's parting question: how to cure psychopathy, if "nobody is born a psychopath" as she says both here and elsewhere (in a terribly cheap penal-porn pop-doco), then i think we can. I think that Literature could be a good starting place. Dose potentially psychopathic children and teenagers with sensibility laden literature like Jane Eyre. They need to learn how to sympathise with others, and literature does this more than anything else. I would also suggest reducing TV and Film intake, as while individuals may be psychopathic, the entertainment industry seems to be psychopathic in nature.

Author writes, "No one is born a psychopath."

Know before you buy that the author, despite a background in neuroscience, opens with the offhanded statement that nobody "is born a psychopath." For those up to speed on the role of fMRI in studying psychopathy, that is just a bizarre claim for a treatment published in 2020.

Insightful

Insightful & brilliant.... I have listened to this book multiple times, absorbing this window into psychopathy.

Best introduction on the topic possible.

Viding is a clear writer. Which is all the more needed on this potentially cloudy issue.

She outlines some problems with current research, while not being overly dramatic about what has been discovered.

She also credits her PHD students which is always admirable.

Impossibility difficult issue, encourages that someone like Viding is also a great writer as well as a valued scientist.

If anyone is starting in this field you can’t do any better right now.